Craig Dearden-Phillips

Andrew:  It's the 2nd June 2009.  I'm here in Bury St. Edmunds with my colleague, Craig, who is standing in the local election.

Craig:  We're doing something called canvassing, and what this involves doing is knocking on people's doors and asking them whether or not they might be likely to vote for us in the election.

Sometimes people won't say how they're voting, so we try and ask them a series of questions, in order for us to be able to make a good guess.  Then we write that down on a canvass sheet.  And then if we think they are going to vote for us, we write them a special letter afterwards, which encourages them to turn out for us on the day.

We've got a team of canvassers out - 5 people - I'm going to find them.  I'm going to give them these leaflets, because they've run out of leaflets, which is why I was away.  So shall we make our way there?

Now on Election Day, at each polling station we have something called a teller.  And what they do is when people come and vote, they ask for their voting card number.  And what we do is when we've took all the numbers, we go back and we check them off against the people who we know we've spoken to.  And if they said they'd voted for us, we cross them off the list.  So we know if our voters have come out for us that day.

And if by about six o'clock they haven't voted yet, we send someone in a car round to their house and ask them to vote.

Tonight we've finished our canvassing and all the results go into a database, into a computer, and that generates a load of letters which we then send to all the people that we canvassed who say that they want to vote for us.

So that's why we do the canvassing - it means that we can contact our supporters shortly afterwards, and can remind them to vote.  Because you'd be amazed at how many people don't know the election is on, on Thursday.

I really enjoy the thought of being the representative.  I've done lots of different things, but I've never done this before.  It's quite exciting to think that I'd be involved as a politician in a council - quite exciting. I've spent my life dealing with them, I'd quite like to be one.

Andrew:  Did you win the election on the 4th June?

Craig:  I did indeed, yes.  I didn't expect to, but I did.  And that was really really good.

Sean:  Will you keep all the promises you made when you were on the campaign trail?

Craig:  Yes.  Well, I'll do my very best, let's say.  I think the main promise I made really was to be, I think, an attentive and kind of quite locally-focussed councillor.  I think a lot of councillors spend a lot of time in meetings, away from the people.  And it's not very apparent to people what you are actually doing.  And a lot of councillors don't spend very much time at all being quick and responsive to people's enquiries.  So I was very keen to be the kind of councillor that people actually want.